The Italian-born Gandhi said yesterday she would decline to serve as prime minister of India. She asked incoming MPs of her Congress party to accept her decision.

"The post of prime minister has not been my aim," Gandhi said.

"I would follow my inner voice. Today it tells me that I must humbly decline this post," Gandhi said in parliament.

Pro-Gandhi demonstrations were staged outside Congress headquarters in other parts of the country, television reports said.

A former provincial Congress legislator held a revolver to his head, threatening to commit suicide in protest against Gandhi's hesitation to become prime minister.

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Police overpowered the pajama-clad man, identified as Gangacharan Rajput, after he fired a round from his pistol.

"Sonia Gandhi should accept (the post) or I do suicide," Rajput later told reporters after the police brought him down from a truck top.

"I missed. My leg seems broken. The police snatched my gun. But thousands will commit suicide if she does not become prime minister.

"Sonia Gandhi is a true patriot. Great injustice is being done to her," the ex-MP said of a concerted attack on Gandhi's foreign roots by India's ousted Hindu nationalists.

Congress lawmakers, elected in just-concluded marathon Indian elections, lent their voice, as well as moral support, to some 2,000 party supporters amid reports that Gandhi had called a crisis meeting of her MPs later yesterday.

"Sonia is immortal. Sonia is our leader," screamed a newly-elected Congress parliamentarian as some supporters threatened to stage a hunger strike to force the mother of two to change her mind.

"We don't know what to do," said Salman Khurshid, a Congress leader who was a close friend of Sonia's slain husband Rajiv Gandhi.

"To be told suddenly that she cannot become prime minister is something we cannot accept. We cannot conceive. We cannot imagine a government without Sonia Gandhi. We have worked very hard for this day and we want her to become prime minister," Khurshid said.

"The 800,000 votes people gave me were cast in the name of Sonia Gandhi and I will beg her not disappoint India's 1,000 million people," added Congress MP Sajjan Kumar.

Hundreds of the supporters also squatted before the Congress party headquarters in New Delhi and blocked traffic, chanting slogans.

"Bring Sonia... save India ... if not Sonia, then no one else," they shouted.

People climbed security cordons ringing the Congress headquarters and waved party flags as the police fought to keep the waves of supporters from the main gates.

Gandhi's central New Delhi home had witnessed similar high drama late Sunday when she again seemed determined not to accept the prime ministerial post, but later Congress said the crisis was averted when their leader changed her mind.

Somnath Chatterjee of the Communist Party of India-Marxist, a Congress ally, said it seemed that Gandhi's children Rahul and Priyanka were against their mother taking up the country's top job because they feared for her safety.